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Forest City will be built east of Cambridge, on around 45,000 acres of land between Haverhill and Newmarket. Haverhill sits right at the edge of it and becomes the gateway to the new city.
The exact boundaries are being refined as part of the detailed masterplanning now underway, and will be examined publicly through the Government's Strategic Planning process.
A detailed map of the proposed area is available in the full report.
Homes aren't being allocated yet — we're still in the planning phase, years before the first home is built. The best thing you can do now is register your interest, so we can let you know the moment things progress.
A brand-new, energy-efficient 4-bed home in Forest City is designed to cost around £350k — as close to cost-price as we can make it. That's possible because a Community Land Trust owns the land beneath each home, keeping prices permanently affordable rather than letting them be flipped for profit.
No one's home needs to be destroyed. Existing villages like Cowlinge, Great Thurlow and Withersfield are protected — surrounded by trees and supported in keeping their own identity, becoming villages within a city, much like Hampstead in London or Grantchester in Cambridge.
On farmland: because a properly planned city fits far more people into a smaller footprint than sprawling village extensions, Forest City would actually save the East of England around 21,500 acres of prime farmland compared with building the same number of homes the usual way.
Read the full answer: What happens to the villages on the land? →
Forest City includes a 12,000-acre nature reserve — the single largest land-based nature reserve in England. Existing woodland, ancient hedgerows and woodland soil are preserved; lost ponds and wetlands are restored; and beavers, storks and otters are reintroduced to a landscape that was once theirs.
Unlike the vague biodiversity promises attached to most developments, these standards are legally enforceable through Nature Covenants agreed with Natural England — so we can be held to account in law if we miss them.
Planning costs around £250m, funded entirely by private investors. If the project is never approved, they lose their money — not the taxpayer.
Homes pay for themselves as they're built. The £~45bn for big infrastructure — railway, reservoir, hospitals, tram network and energy — is borrowed by the city itself and repaid over decades from the city's own revenues. This is the standard model for large-scale infrastructure projects.
Forest City is a plan for Britain's first new city in over 50 years—a city of up to a million people, built over 30 years on 45,000 acres of land between Haverhill and Newmarket.
It is not a housing estate. It's a complete city, planned properly from day one: 400,000 affordable homes, a 12,000 acre nature reserve (the largest in England), a 1,600 acre reservoir/lake you can swim in, four new hospitals, a tram network, and a new train station at Haverhill connecting to Cambridge and London.
Haverhill sits right at the edge of it. Today, Haverhill is one of the largest towns in Britain without a train station, passed over by successive governments while Cambridge gets the investment. Forest City puts Haverhill at the centre of the story instead: the jobs, the training colleges, the healthcare, and the transport links arrive on its doorstep, starting years before the first home is even built.
The plan is privately funded. We will spend the next few years developing the masterplan, which will then be examined publicly through the Government's Strategic Planning process. If approved, a government-owned development corporation would build the city—the same model that delivered Canary Wharf and the Olympic Park.
Cambridge is one of the most important cities in Europe. It's receiving huge investment, seeing massive growth, and is struggling to keep up with demand.
We've spoken to many household-name businesses and start-ups alike that are having to leave Cambridge for other parts of Britain or even other countries, because they can't get office/lab space, and their employees can't get homes with less than a 1.5hr commute.
Located next to Cambridge—which itself has produced more Nobel Prizes than all of France—on the way to Felixstowe, packed full of brilliant, hard-working, passionate people, Haverhill is very strategically placed.
The truth is, we're not the only ones that have noticed. The Greater Cambridge Development Corporation plans to build 150k homes including along the A1307, reaching all the way to the outskirts of Haverhill. There won't be a new reservoir, a new hospital, or a new train station. There will just be new cookie-cutter homes to share the same roads, with zero consideration of what the people of Suffolk need or want.
And combined, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and North Essex have been tasked with building 340k homes in the next 25 years—again, these will be delivered piecemeal, without infrastructure, without central planning, and without including Haverhill in the story.
Forest City will change Haverhill, that's for sure. We believe it changes it like this: a town of 27,000 becomes the gateway to a city of a million, with a train station, a hospital on its doorstep, training colleges, and tens of thousands of new customers within a few miles of its high street. Haverhill's businesses gain a market twenty times their current size. Haverhill's young people gain somewhere to live without leaving.
The alternative is not "no change." If Forest City doesn't happen, the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation plans 150,000 homes, many along the A1307—more pressure on the same roads, the same GP surgeries, and the same water supply, with no station, no hospital, and no say for Haverhill.
There are real open questions—about the high street, about local businesses—and we want Haverhill to answer them, not us. That's why we're hosting a series of co-design sessions just for Haverhillians: for the first time, Haverhill in the driver's seat rather than having things done to it by Cambridge and Suffolk.
No one's home needs to be destroyed for Forest City. All existing villages like Cowlinge, Great Thurlow, and Withersfield will be protected—surrounded by trees and supported in retaining their own culture, identity, and way of life.
These villages will, over the next 30 years, become like Hampstead is in London, or Grantchester is in Cambridge—a village within a city.
We expect Haverhill's house prices to increase both before and during construction. Building the city will require tens of thousands of people of varying skillsets—from surveying to construction, from ecologists to electricians, from planners to teachers.
Given the vast number of people and skillsets, we have various questions to answer in the next couple of years, including:
Forest City will create new jobs, new education facilities, new transport links, and new healthcare facilities—all before anything even starts being built.
Haverhill is strategically located to benefit from all of this, and homes will become more in-demand, not less.
The people Britain's housing market has failed.
The 32-year-old software engineer paying £2,000 a month for a one-bed in London, the Cambridge scientist priced out of the city where she works. The young couple who've done everything right and still can't start a family, the Haverhill kids who currently have to leave the town they grew up in to find a home of their own.
Around them, everyone a real city needs: artists (who thrive when rents are affordable), teachers, retirees (who benefit from far cheaper retirement homes), founders, and families. Around 30% of homes will be for rent, so the city works at every stage of life, not just for buyers.
No on both counts. Land for Forest City is being secured through voluntary options—negotiated privately with landowners who are free to refuse—and nobody's home will be compulsorily purchased. Existing homes will be integrated into the city; we're trying to build homes, not destroy them.
Landowners who sell are paid well above agricultural value, and farming families affected by the change will be compensated properly through arrangements negotiated privately, not imposed. Taxpayers don't pay for the land: its cost, and that compensation, is baked into the price of every home sold. On current costings, housing sales return around £13 billion to the development corporation—roughly double the entire cost of the land and compensation combined—with the surplus contributing to the infrastructure fund.
Read the full answer: Will Forest City use compulsory purchase? →
Given the central government is forcing the region to build 340k homes over the next 25 years, Forest City will actually reduce the amount of farmland that will be built on.
The default way Britain builds homes is by urban sprawl around existing villages and towns—smearing the construction and destruction across as many areas as possible, all so the developers don't need to build infrastructure.
Currently, sprawling developments typically take up 15 dwellings per hectare (dph). Because Forest City will be properly planned next to areas of employment, and also come with public transport including a tram network, Forest City homes can be built closer together (think the terraced streets of Cambridge, Bath and London). This way we use 3x less land per home. We've calculated that 340,000 'development as normal' homes over the next 25 years would consume at least 56k acres of greenfield land. Subtracting 13.5k acres of new woodland and the lake, Forest City would be using only 31.5k acres as built-on land. So because cities can fit vastly more people in a smaller footprint than village extensions ever could, Forest City would save the East of England around 21.5k acres of prime farmland.
Read the full answer: Will Forest City destroy Suffolk farmland? →
The opposite. Forest City includes a 12,000 acre nature reserve, which would be the single largest land-based nature reserve in England.
This isn't the usual developer routine of bulldozing a site and planting a few saplings around the edges. The plan works with what's already there: every acre of existing woodland is kept and protected. Ancient hedgerows, trees and woodland soil are preserved without exception. Lost woodland, ponds, and wetlands will be restored to a baseline from the year 1880. The River Stour runs through the reserve with a 100 metre buffer either side. Beavers, storks, and otters will be reintroduced to a landscape that was once theirs only a few generations ago. Any trees or hedgerows that have to be removed will be replaced with plantings that provide the same carbon, ecological and ecosystem benefits within 10 years.
And unlike the vague biodiversity promises that come with most developments, these standards will be legally enforceable through Nature Covenants, with targets negotiated with Natural England: Local Nature Reserve standard within 5 years, National Nature Reserve within 10, SSSIs within 25. If we miss them, we can be held to account in law.
East Anglia is one of the driest regions in Britain, and water is the most legitimate constraint on growth around Cambridge. It's also why Forest City is designed around water from day one, rather than treating it as someone else's problem like typical developers do.
At the centre of the city is a 1,600 acre reservoir, providing over half the city's water needs, alongside being a lake to swim and boat in and a home for nature. Britain hasn't completed a major new reservoir in over 30 years; Forest City will build one as core infrastructure, connected into Anglian Water's strategic network for resilience. Every home is built to modern water efficiency standards with reuse and sustainable drainage designed in, so residents use a fraction of the water of the average British household.
Forest City will build its own water supply—the new 1,600-acre reservoir, advanced treatment works and strategic pipeline connections—costed at up to £4.5 billion within the £45 billion infrastructure budget. One claim made in Parliament added £4 billion of water costs on top of that budget, but the water infrastructure is already inside the £45 billion. Counting it twice doesn't reveal a black hole; it reveals a double count.
Compare the alternative: 340,000 homes scattered across the region as village extensions, each drawing on the same strained rivers and chalk aquifers, with developers left without responsibility for building new water supply.
Read the full answer: Is there enough water for Forest City? →
We do think it's awful that Haverhill is one of the largest towns in the country without a train station—particularly given Newmarket, a town much smaller, does have one. Cambridge just had £250m spent on its new station.
This said, the Treasury doesn't make decisions based on fairness—they make them based on spreadsheets. Unfortunately, there currently isn't enough of a business case to justify building more infrastructure for Haverhill.
Forest City changes this dynamic quite significantly. We expect Haverhill to become the most strategic point in the run-up to, and during, construction of the city. This will bring new jobs, a hospital on its doorstep, training colleges, investment, and yes—a train station.
On current costings, a four-bed family home in Forest City is expected to sell for under £350,000, a three-bed for around £230,000, and a two-bed for around £180,000. For comparison, the average terraced house in Cambridge—22 minutes away by rail—costs £494,000 on the official UK House Price Index.
These are not small homes. The four-bed is 1,720 square feet over three storeys with a private garden, far larger than a typical British new build. The prices are possible because the land is bought at close to farmland prices—secured through voluntary options before city status inflates its value—and because building at city scale drives the cost per square foot down to a fraction of what South East developers pay. The price covers everything, including the land, and still returns a profit to the development corporation. No subsidy. Just cheap land and scale.
Buyers own their home; the Community Land Trust owns the land beneath it. Because homes can only be sold back to the city, the discount can't be flipped for profit—it's passed on, permanently, to the next generation. We focus on the four-bed because a large part of our mission is to enable young people to have families again; the lack of affordable four-bed homes is a major contributor to birth-rate decline in Britain.
Around 30% of homes will be for rent, so the city works for people at every stage of life, not just buyers.
Read the full answer: How much will a Forest City home cost? →
Because scale is what pays for infrastructure. This is the single most misunderstood thing about property development in modern Britain.
A 2,000-home development can't fund a train station. A 10,000-home development can't fund a hospital or a reservoir. That's why Haverhill, after decades of piecemeal growth, has none of these things—every scheme was individually too small to justify them, so the developers built houses and left.
A city of a million people flips the equation. At that scale, a railway, a reservoir, hospitals, a tram network, and a 12,000 acre nature reserve all become affordable—funded by the value the city creates rather than by taxpayers. Britain used to understand this: it's how the Victorians built, and it's why we're proposing one properly planned city as an alternative to 340,000 homes smeared across the East of England as village extensions that fund nothing.
Building small is how you get all of the housing with none of the benefits.
Thirty years of building is a serious undertaking, and we won't pretend otherwise. But the sequencing matters.
Infrastructure comes first—rail links, roads, and utilities are built before the homes, which means construction materials increasingly move by rail rather than by lorry through villages. Construction traffic will be routed on dedicated haul roads away from existing villages and the A1307.
This said, the construction years are also the opportunity years. Building the city needs tens of thousands of people—surveyors, ecologists, electricians, planners, teachers. For the towns and villages nearby, the disruption will come along with jobs, investment, and the arrival of the station and hospital.
Every listed building keeps its full legal protection—a development corporation has no power to change that, and we wouldn't want it to. Churches, halls, and historic buildings within the area will be integrated into the city with their settings respected, as they were when villages like Hampstead were absorbed into London.
Archaeology gets more attention with Forest City, not less. Much of this land has never been professionally surveyed—whatever lies under the plough soil has sat unexamined for centuries and is degraded a little more each year by agriculture. Before construction, the entire site will need to undergo systematic archaeological survey and recording, likely the largest such programme in the East of England's history. What's found will be preserved, recorded, and displayed in the city itself.
The Community Land Trust is part of the scheme to solve a specific problem: the city will sell homes well below market prices—to make them actually affordable—instead of optimising to make as much money from homes as possible.
The risk here is that a bunch of "investors" come along and buy the homes cheaply, then re-sell them for twice the price—making money for themselves and effectively stealing the discount that is intended for future generations.
So to solve this, each home is sold with a covenant—if you want to sell one of these new homes, you must sell it back to the city as buyer of first resort at a valuation decided by the CLT (governed by residents). Typically, CLTs publish a valuation formula which includes inflation, gradual normalisation with market rates, and some discretionary amount based on improvements that have been made to the home since it was bought.
Of course, if the city declines to buy back the home, it can be sold on the open market.
This is up to the residents, who will become custodians of this legacy left for future generations.
We expect at least 100 years, but it could perhaps go on even longer. It depends how Victorian our descendants feel.
We expect the Government to establish a development corporation for the project—this development corporation will be fully owned and governed by the government itself, who will then appoint people to run it, tasked with effectively implementing the masterplans we provide.
The building of homes, offices, infrastructure, and more will be sub-contracted out to construction firms. This is different to how most development works, where a house building company buys land to build homes and the minimum possible infrastructure in order to make their margins as large as possible.
We don't intend to submit a planning application—there isn't a planning authority that is appropriate. The Government has introduced a new process for large strategic projects like Forest City, called Strategic Planning. As the first part of this process, we will be publishing a high-level Spatial Development Strategy in late 2026. This document will cover how Forest City could impact other regional projects and political jurisdictions.
We expect to follow the Strategic Planning process, which will require the benefits and drawbacks of the scheme to be publicly examined, in due course.
We expect to follow the Strategic Planning process, which was created by the Government precisely to enable this type of project. The process will mean the project's details will be examined publicly and democratically.
No, and it would be strange if there were government backing yet. We haven't asked. Here's the order things happen in: £250m of private planning, public scrutiny, then and only then a decision on a development corporation.
Read the full answer: Does Forest City have government backing? →
As we've laid out in our report and delivery overview, we expect a development corporation to be established some time in 2029.
In 2030, the core pieces of infrastructure will begin to be built—including the nature reserve, a hospital, trainlines and stations, a reservoir, and a power station. Shortly after this, home and office construction will begin. To build the city to its full potential will likely take 30 years from this point.
We do expect to begin establishing further education in the region before 2029—a college to train people in the many hundreds of skills that construction and operation of Europe's first city in 50 years will need.
We are doing this because Britain as a whole has a big problem—it's impossible for most young people to buy a home and have children. There are many causes of this, from not enough housing being built, to not enough economic growth (salaries have grown slower in Britain than in the US).
We're not developers—we're not trying to make money from building homes, or land banking, or planning flipping.
Shiv's background is in investigative journalism and campaigning for inter-generational fairness. Joe's background is in software engineering, AI, and campaigning for things that will make Britain richer.
We (ACDC Ltd.) won't actually be the ones building anything. Our job, much like Seb Coe with the Olympics, is to prove viability, provide a plan, and prepare the ground for a Government-led development. This is how Canary Wharf, now one of Britain's most successful developments, was built.
Our job is to promote East Anglia—a huge asset to Britain (Joe has centuries of family history in Norfolk) that has long been ignored. We think East Anglia, Suffolk, and Haverhill specifically are hugely strategically important to Britain's future, and have been under-invested in by successive governments.
And we're not alone. Forest City's advisory board and working groups include Paul Johnson, former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; Patricia Hewitt, former Secretary of State for Trade and for Health; Tim Leunig, economic adviser to two Chancellors; Steve McAdam, masterplanner of King's Cross and the Olympic Park; and Jackie Sadek, chair of the London–Cambridge Innovation Corridor — alongside more than forty architects, engineers, hydrologists, transport planners and housing lawyers who have given their expertise pro bono, because they think this should exist. The National Federation of Builders has publicly backed the proposal.
Planning is funded entirely by private investors, motivated by two things: fixing Britain, and making a return on their money. If the project never gets approved, they lose their money, not you.
Forest City's infrastructure will cost up to £45 billion over 30 years, paid for by the city itself rather than the taxpayer. The rail, metro, roads, four hospitals, hundreds of schools, water, power and fibre have all been costed line by line by area experts.
The city pays for itself the same way Canary Wharf and Milton Keynes did: by capturing the value of the land it creates. A field is worth a few thousand pounds an acre; the same acre in a city centre is worth millions. That uplift—which normally goes to landowners and speculators—instead funds the city. Homes, meanwhile, pay for themselves, each one sold as it's built.
Three groups profit from Forest City, openly: the private investors who fund it, the residents who live in it, and the country that gains a new engine of growth—all without taxpayer subsidy.
The company behind the project, ACDC, spends around £280 million of private money on masterplanning and land options, with zero government capital at risk. In return it receives 160 acres of commercial land in the new city's business district. If the city fails, investors lose their money; if it succeeds, they share in the value they helped create. This is the Canary Wharf model, and it worked.
We did initially try to structure the project as a non-profit—we're motivated primarily by fixing the social contract—but it quickly became clear there wasn't enough money available to fund a project of this type in the non-profit space. To keep us and our investors aligned to the goal, our returns are tied to commercial land, not to houses: we'd lose money if we just built homes and no infrastructure, because no companies would want to move in.
Residents get homes they can afford, permanently protected from speculation by the Community Land Trust.
We understand why you'd expect that, but crime follows deprivation, bad design and absent services, not population size. Forest City is designed to the principles that make places safe: walkable streets where neighbours can see the street, genuinely affordable homes, jobs on the doorstep, and policing funded from day one alongside every other service.
The picture you might have in mind — the 1960s estates, homes dropped onto fields with no jobs, no transport and no services — is exactly the model we reject. Those places failed because everything except the housing came late or never. Here, infrastructure and employment come first, by design.
Beyond the SEZ benefits, the scale of development creates its own gravitational pull. Unlike small developments that must attract employers one by one, a city-scale project with committed infrastructure investment, a large prospective workforce, and purpose-built commercial facilities presents a fundamentally different proposition. The combination of tax advantages, purpose-built facilities, access to an eager workforce living in affordable housing, and the ability to expand physical operations fast, creates an unmatched business case.
This is always the tricky part. The SEZ (special economic zone) and CLT (community land trust) combination, creates compelling incentives for both sides simultaneously. Residents get housing below market rates - an unprecedented opportunity in the current market. Employers receive exceptional business benefits through the SEZ framework. This dual-incentive structure ensures balanced growth rather than empty commercial or residential developments. We're not hoping for organic growth by selling at market rates; we're engineering subsidies by lifting bureaucracy building at scale and lowering taxes, thereby creating aligned economic incentives.
The economics work because of our unique SEZ/CLT (Special Economic Zone/Community Land Trust) combination and the scale of development. At city scale, the value uplift from commercial acreage is exponentially larger than in smaller developments. This commercial value can cross-subsidize residential prices in ways impossible for traditional town developments. Additionally, greenfield development eliminates the expensive land acquisition costs that plague town extensions, where compulsory purchase of existing developed land drives up costs significantly.
Town extensions face significant challenges: planning battles with existing residents, expensive land acquisition even with compulsory purchase powers, difficulty achieving good placemaking within existing constraints, and lengthy build processes. Most critically, they rarely improve productivity metrics and struggle to create affordable housing due to high land costs. The new city approach solves these issues systematically.
New towns offer some advantages like better placemaking potential and faster greenfield construction. However, they face critical limitations: they must be located next to existing infrastructure to be viable, they have minimal commercial centers requiring profitability through much higher residential prices, and they're unlikely to change regional productivity metrics. They remain dependent on other areas for employment rather than creating self-sustaining economic ecosystems. And yet politically speaking, they are often as difficult to create as new cities.
The risk profile actually improves at scale. Small developments fail if they can't attract enough residents or employers quickly. City-scale development creates momentum through critical mass - the infrastructure investments, anchor tenants, and initial residential phases create irreversible momentum that de-risks subsequent phases. The bigger risk is thinking too small and creating another failed new town rather than a transformative new city.
After more than 15 years of stagnation, per capita GDP growth is paramount. Data from the Resolution Foundation shows that our last new city, Milton Keynes is far more productive than anywhere else in the UK except London. Conversely, adding homes to existing lower productivity places might be far less cost-effective because: 1. The infrastructure to make those places more productive (mass transit, better road networks, phone masts, sewerage, cheaper energy) is rarely guaranteed to be built alongside housing. 2. When it is built, it's painfully slow and expensive because people already live there and have huge veto powers. 3. You can't capture the land uplift value to pay people off. Given the crisis we're in, pitting efficient, at-scale greenfield build-out that pays for itself against expensive retrofitting via town extensions makes little sense.
We've got plenty of smart people in the UK and families who are already well rooted in towns and cities are less likely to move. What this new city does is to agglomerate talent in one place and unlock huge amounts of productivity and disposable income for those residents so they can spend, be more entrepreneurial and not have to worry about being forced to move.
They should copy our model by buying farmland land and building! Reforming a 70 year policy (the Greenbelt) is probably the best start. We want a race to the top not the bottom.
There simply isn't enough brownfield land to do something like this at this scale. Also the CLT model only works when there's enough real land uplift to lock in for future generations.
An excellent one we hope! Before we nationalised planning in 1947, developers would be compensated by local authorities if their plans were refused. We reversed that in a climate where it was expected that local authorities would do all the building. Otherwise some of our greatest projects, The Olympics, the Channel Tunnel, Canary Wharf, and Milton Keynes, have used primary legislation and development corporations to push through major building projects of national importance.
This is a vital question but providing huge numbers of jobs, and massively upgraded road and rail links, should be where we start.
We've set out what this means in more detail for the people closest to the plan: see our For Haverhill page for the town on the city's doorstep, and our For Neighbours page for the surrounding villages and countryside.
CLT models don't work with regeneration. They only work when the land is very cheap to buy in the first place. However we think the Forest City model will work anywhere there is a demand from both business and prospective residents to unlock growth at scale.
In order to best align interests, ACDC is a profit making company. Like Canary Wharf and other big scale developments, we will seek out an option on commercial land as a reward for risking tens of millions in development capital by designing, planning, and proving the business case for Forest City 1.
No. That Forest City is a $100 billion development in Johor, Malaysia, built by Country Garden and best known for being largely empty. Ours is between Haverhill and Newmarket, and our plan starts from the opposite premise: demand first. We're building next to the most supply-starved labour market in Britain precisely so that the homes are lived in, not invested in — and the Community Land Trust makes buying-to-leave-empty pointless anyway, since homes can't be flipped for profit.
For people who already exist and already need homes — very likely including someone in your own family. England is short roughly four million homes today, counted in hidden households: adults living with their parents into their thirties, families in temporary accommodation, house-shares full of people who want their own front door. Forest City addresses a backlog, not a projection.
The shortage is worst exactly where the jobs are. Housing around Cambridge is among the least affordable in Britain relative to local wages — which is also why so many people's children and grandchildren leave. A planned city relieves that pressure in one place; without it, the same demand arrives anyway as piecemeal estates bolted onto every town and village in the region.
England has massively underbuilt on its land compared to every other European nation. We're in a housing crisis where even the richest 10% of Londoners can't afford a home. The affordability crisis is bad in every major English conurbation. We need new cities. But we can also build with gentle density, in a way that creates new places and communities, not just boxy homes on the edge of towns.
No. But that's why we're exploring modular/factory pre built building methods which, at scale, can reduce the need for skilled labour.
We've been advised by one of the leading UK experts that it is. But that doesn't mean there won't be very substantial issues to overcome. The expertise, quality and raw materials exist in Europe.
We will need to build hundreds of primary schools, scores of secondary schools, hospitals and vital community services. This is one of the great benefits of building an entire city as opposed to a small town extension or just some extra homes on the edge of a village - the Section 106 agreements are more than effectively baked in.
Much of Britain's staffing crisis is a housing crisis in disguise. Hospitals and schools around Cambridge struggle to recruit because the people they need can't afford to live within reach. Forest City reverses that: a nurse or newly qualified teacher priced out of Cambridge can own a home minutes from work.
We're also planning training capacity, not just recruitment — space is reserved for a teaching hospital, a further-education campus and nursing and teacher training, so the city grows the country's workforce rather than spreading it thinner.
Most of Britain's accessibility problem is the cost of retrofitting old buildings — and in Forest City, we're not adapting anything. We're starting from a blank sheet, so accessibility is being designed into the framework of the city, not bolted on.
Because homes are built at cost through the Community Land Trust, an accessible home won't carry the same premium it does everywhere else.
We're working with disability access experts as part of the masterplanning process to ensure the city is a wonderful place to live for everyone.
We haven't built a reservoir in this country for 30 years. Building a city will also give us the land, space and permission to build new water infrastructure and also build a much smarter sewerage system.
Homes in Forest City are not yet on sale, and the first residents are still some years away. The way to be first in line is to sign up for email updates, where we'll announce how homes are allocated before anywhere else.
Around 400,000 homes are planned—roughly 70% sold through the Community Land Trust and around 30% available to rent. Prices stay affordable permanently: when an owner sells, the Trust buys the home back at a fair price, so the next family gets the same deal you did.
Yes. Community Land Trust homes are mortgaged every day in Britain — banks already lend on CLT and shared-equity homes, and the model has operated in the UK for decades.
Taxes can be easily changed by democratic mandate. We want this set up to last for longer than a five year cycle.
We want to reform the social contract around housing. Where you live, work and raise children, should not be an asset for speculators to drive financial gains. It's been at the root of many of our economic woes. The CLT model will change that for everyone living in the city.
Yes. There's no two ways around this. Only ~1 million people can live in the city. But building good things for some people is not a reason to build nothing for anyone. We have to start somewhere. If this model works, we want to roll it out across the country.
Yes. But our current system is far, far, worse. We discriminate on the basis of who your parents are - very rich so they can give you a deposit, or very poor, so they can hand off a social home.
If there is a waiting list, the City's Community Land Trust will pay them for the current price of the home (not the land underneath it).
We are working with the Community Land Trust Network to ensure our legal and financing structures will be very robust.
This will be funded in very large part, via private finance. But this is only feasible if the government passes legislation for a development corporation who can build without traditional planning constraints.
We need to build not just all the amenities a city needs, but also infrastructure the wider East of England can benefit from—energy, road and rail. The infrastructure is funded by leasing and selling Forest City's 8,000 acres of commercial land, which is expected to generate more than the £45 billion required. That is 17% of the site, including around 1,300 acres for a new Central Business District.
Value that CBD at just a quarter of central London prices—at least £25 million an acre—and leasing it generates over £32 billion. The remaining commercial land, at £1 million to £10 million an acre depending on use, could generate a further £35 billion. The precedent is strong: at Canary Wharf, land values rose from £1.3 million to £70 million an acre. Forest City's commercial district sits 22 minutes from Cambridge, at the intersection of Britain's two strongest growth corridors.
No. The £110 billion figure, claimed in Parliament, counts a private developer's markup as a public cost. Forest City homes sell for around £350,000 because the speculative land cost has been removed—not because anyone is paying a subsidy.
The argument runs: a private developer would charge far more per home, therefore each home has a "gap", and someone must pay it. But the gap is not a cost. It's the margin that expensive land and restricted supply currently allow developers to charge. Remove the expensive land and the markup disappears. Nobody pays for something that no longer exists.
The homes are owned and sold by a Community Land Trust. The sale price covers the land, the groundworks, the utility connections and the build, and still returns a profit to the development corporation. On current costings, housing sales alone generate around £13 billion of surplus. A project that returns £13 billion does not have a £110 billion hole in it.
They won't be. At least not directly with cash. We do believe that any new endeavour like this, which no other European or North American country has attempted in 50 years, needs to be given a chance to succeed by lowering the risks to entry. Balancing what ordinary people get and commerce also receives is vitally important to making the whole project work for the benefit of the country as a whole.
We're planning that 30% of homes will be available to rent as part of a rental cooperative.
Yes. Stratford City proves we can do this. That development showed we can create pedestrianized, human-scale environments where children can run free because the world was designed with them in mind—safe, walkable neighborhoods built to exceptional standards. If we could do that for the Olympics, we can do this for the nation. For the sake of the next generation, we have no choice but to continue believing we can still do remarkable things.
Building a city and running one are different budgets, so let's separate them.
Building is the £45 billion — rail, reservoir, hospitals, schools, power — funded by the value of the city's commercial land, not the taxpayer. That's covered elsewhere in this FAQ.
Running works the way it does everywhere else in England, because Forest City's residents are taxpayers like everyone else: NHS funding follows patients, per-pupil funding follows children. What Forest City changes is the part that's normally broken — the buildings. A new hospital in Britain usually takes decades of lobbying; here, four are in the plan from day one, funded by land value rather than tax payers.
Yes — this shouldn't be a city only for people who can buy. Around 30% of Forest City's homes will be rented through the city's own rental cooperative, at rents set to cost rather than whatever the market will bear — including homes at social-rent-equivalent levels for households on low incomes.
The reason we can promise this is structural, not charitable: the land is held by the community trust and homes are sold at build cost, so there's no developer margin that low rents have to compete with.
No. Forest City sets aside 12,000 acres—more than a quarter of the site—as a permanent nature reserve, alongside a 1,600-acre reservoir with natural wetland edges. The land today is almost entirely intensive arable farmland, which supports far less wildlife than the woodland, meadow and marsh that will replace it on that quarter.
Every ancient and veteran tree on the site is retained. The reserve is designed for the return of species Britain has lost: beavers, storks, otters. Rewilding projects like Knepp show what former farmland can become in a couple of decades; Forest City does it at ten times the scale, protected permanently, and pays for it without a penny of public money.
Much of the land we're looking to build on is monocultural farmland. Monocultures are actually one of the worst environments for biodiversity. We'd be replacing a substantial proportion of it with either parks, gardens and a 12,000 acres which are much better habitats for replenishing nature than monocultures.
We'll work with anyone as long as the basic principles of the city are adhered to - its scale, general location, ability to build at speed, the Community Land Trust and the Special Economic Zone provisions.
Labour has said they already want to do this and we support that but we don't want take a wait and see approach. Also de-nationalising planning laws is not on the table so building a city, as opposed to much smaller scale developments, would always need the support of Parliament. This isn't just about more homes, it's about a new socio-economic contract.
After a period of time, the development corporation will eventually hand planning control to what we envisage will be a new local authority.
Several ways, and we'd rather hear from you directly than not at all.
The formal route: Forest City will be examined through the Government's Strategic Planning process, which includes statutory public consultation — every benefit and drawback of the scheme tested in public, with local residents, councils and statutory bodies all heard. That process is the proper venue for objection, and it has real teeth.
The direct route: fill in our feedback form. We read everything, and we've made a habit of answering the hardest questions publicly — this FAQ exists because people asked difficult things and deserved answers.
We know some people will oppose Forest City whatever we say. That's their right. But if what you actually want is answers — about your village, your farm, your water, your commute — you'll get more from asking us than from a petition site.
Greenfield development at city scale allows us to design integrated transport from the ground up. Unlike town extensions where retrofitting trams and transit is complex and expensive, we can build these systems as part of the initial infrastructure, making them more cost-effective and better integrated with the overall urban design.
This is always a risk, but this particular government seems determined to drive through infrastructure delivery. We envisage that the dedicated link to Cambridge will be undertaken by the development corporation itself.
Cities operate on quite different economic principles than new towns. Towns are primarily about commuting to and from other locations, making proximity to existing employers and transport crucial. Cities, however, create intra-area employment and activity hubs. They're about pulling people in from surrounding regions rather than sending residents elsewhere. Given the substantial current and latent regional activity in East Anglia and London, the new city would function as a regional hub with its own transport spokes, not just another commuter town dependent on existing links. Secondly the infrastructure economics fundamentally change at city scale. A city of 1 million people creates an overwhelming business case for dedicated rail and motorway connections - the per capita infrastructure costs decline massively compared to smaller developments. While a town of 30-70k might never justify dedicated road and rail links, a city-scale development makes these investments economically viable. We're designing at a scale where the infrastructure investment makes clear financial sense.
Newmarket is not inside Forest City. The town, the Heath, the gallops and the stud land around it sit outside the proposed area, and nothing in the plan builds on any of it.
What Newmarket does get from the plan: the double-tracking of the Cambridge–Newmarket line, removing the single-track bottleneck that has constrained the town's rail service for decades, and Felixstowe freight moved off the A14.
Racing has been in Newmarket for 350 years. It will still be there in 350 more. We'd quite like a day at the July Course to be a tram-and-train journey for a million new racegoers.
Newmarket's position as the global headquarters of horseracing is protected — and that protection reaches beyond the town. The Heath, the training grounds and the stud land around Newmarket sit outside the developed area, and the masterplan treats the wider equestrian landscape of your villages as one of the area's defining assets, not an obstacle to build over.
A city of a million people is also a large new market for your industry: veterinary practices, feed merchants, farriers, riding schools and racing tourism all gain customers rather than losing ground.
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